The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Okay, let’s see a show of hands. Who thinks, like Donald J. Trump does, that he’s the greatest president in our nation’s history? C’mon, now, don’t be shy, we can’t see your faces, much less your hands. Who thinks Mt. Rushmore should have another face carved into the mountain even if we have to erase one of the other, lesser, presidents to get Donald’s face up there? Really? Nobody?

All right, put your hands up if you think the Trumpster was the worst president in American history. I got mine up, just so you know I’m not hiding my biases. And I’m smiling this morning after watching him board the helicopter and then Air Force One before jetting off to nurse his wounds and cheat at golf in Mar-a-Lago. It feels like a weight lifted off finally after four long years and maybe we can breathe easy again. Okay, okay, you can put your hands down now, both of them. Later we’ll tabulate the votes and get back to you with the results. Course, as you know, half the country will assume this poll was rigged. Probably by the Lizard People.

It’s been awhile since my high school history classes. It’s even been awhile since I taught history in 8th grade. Most of the presidents get pretty short shrift in those textbooks. I mean, how much do you know about Millard Fillmore? Not much, I’m betting, maybe not a bad prez, mostly just forgettable. Herbert Hoover left us with the Great Depression, but I’m not sure we can blame the guy for that. Not totally, anyway. Gerald Ford I do remember. Although, really, I can’t remember much, not that that makes him a bad president, just the poor guy who filled in when Nixon resigned instead of being impeached. William Henry Harrison was president about one month before dying of typhoid or pneumonia or god only knows what. Can’t really say he was the worst, just the shortest, which, considering who just left office, I’d say might have been a small blessing.

You go down a list of Presidents, you probably couldn’t rate them high or low or in the middle. Lincoln we like, Jefferson too, Andy Jackson some like but he wasn’t one of my favorites, sort of a proto-Trump, a raging racist, a bully, a man who didn’t care much for the rule of law if the rules got in his way. Which they did.

But Donald J. Trump. History will not be kind. Impeached twice, the king of emoluments, nepotist-in-chief, dog whistler, bully with or without the pulpit, liar extraordinaire, anti-media, a demagogue of a sort I don’t think we’ve seen prior and hopefully won’t see again. In the final days of his four year reign he pardoned cronies and crooks, refused to concede a democratic election and finally called for his faithful to storm the Capitol where a pitched battle ensued that resulted in people killed but not, as per the plans of some who breached the building, to take Senators and Representatives hostage, possibly even assassinate them. Oh, and did I mention the 400,000 dead from the virus he did virtually nothing to stop from wreaking havoc on his minions?

Does all this make him the worst president in our two and a half century history? I think we all know the answer. And no, it’s not the Lizard King.

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You’re probably, like myself, no economist. You’re happy if you’ve got money enough to pay for a roof over your head, food for the family, the monthly car payments and at least the minimum on your credit card debt. After that, well, let’s leave it to the folks who understand the intricacies of running an economy as large and complicated as the United States. After all, they did a good job … other than a few recessions and the Great Depression. Sure, a few folks fell between the cracks, but hey, we have more billionaires than ever. In fact, the President is a billionaire or so he claims. If anyone would understand how to run a complicated economy, it’s got to be a billionaire president.

We were all told as far back as grade school we have equal opportunity in the Land of the Free. If you’re white. And male. And it helps if you went to a prestigious school, say Yale or Harvard or Wharton. We all had that same chance, right? Equal opportunity, right? So if a lot more of us these days are falling behind on the mortgage, if we’re sleeping in our cars or in a tent under the freeway overpass, we had the same opportunities as the rich folks, we just didn’t play our cards right. We were dumb. We were losers. Nobody to blame but ourselves. Unless you think the game is rigged. Unless you think America is a sucker’s bet. And I know you don’t want to believe that…. You want to believe you have the same chance of becoming a billionaire, just like the former president, just like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the folks who doubled or tripled or quadrupled their worth in the last year. And if you have to do it by playing the Lottery, well, okay, buy the ticket, take the ride. There’s always a chance. You do not win, the gaming commission will tell you, if you do not play.

2020 and the pandemic kind of lessened the odds for most people, maybe not the rich. Jobs gone, rent due, credit card maxed. The economy stalled, except maybe the stock market, times look tough. The lesson most economists not in this Administration took from the Great Depression is government needs to spend like drunken sailors to keep the pump primed. Money in the hands of the bottom percentiles is money that gets spent. Shops get customers, cars get sold, rent gets paid, the economy keeps sputtering along. The first stimulus checks that went out did just that. Course, they put the lion’s share in the hands of the wealthiest among us. Seems fair. If you’re already rich.

The latest stimulus bill stalled over how much to give the little folks. Even Trump, blowing the negotiations to bits at the 11th hour, thought the poor ought to get more money. But the Senate howled, the Senate balked, the Senate cried socialism for the rich. Why give a family making 150,000 a year more money, they cried. Course, they could cap the income levels. They could hold back the largesse for the richest corporations. They could have done that back in the first go round. But they didn’t, they don’t and they won’t. Socialism for the rich, they say, and too big a deficit, they say, even though they gave tax breaks to the corporations once they had a billionaire president and control of the Senate.

I should have gone to Harvard Bizness School, is all I can figure, because none of this makes much sense to me. Why, I guess, I’m not a billionaire.

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I had a cousin whose husband taught in an upscale private school outside of Chicago. Some of the parents hired him part time to do maintenance and lawn work on the weekends, no doubt tossing him crumbs to supplement the low salary he was paid to teach their debutantes. One of his benefactors, upon answering the front door when Fred first came to the job for hedge trimming, refused to talk to him, informing him brusquely that the ‘help’ were required to use the back door, then unceremoniously slammed the door in his face. Welcome to the caste system, American style!

Fred must have needed the money is all I could figure because he went to the back door, knocked once more, received m’lord’s instructions and went to work manicuring his hedges. I know what I would have done, but then, easy for me to say back then since I didn’t have a wife and a kid, a mortgage, car payments, credit card debt and the rest. But the story stuck with me. And not just because my cousin actually had been a New York debutante and was the daughter of a vice president of a national tobacco company. Maybe she understood the perks and privileges of the rich and famous, let her husband lick boots, that’s how it works.

I read today that Ivanka and Jared refused to let the Secret Service agents assigned for their protection use any of their six bathrooms in their upscale digs. For a time they had a porta-potty sitting out by the street for the ‘help’ to use during those long waits. Course, the neighbors took umbrage, probably what his and her majesty wanted after complaints that the Secret Service cars were taking up precious parking spaces in their tony neighborhood, so eventually the agents had to locate other bathroom spots, everything from knocking on neighbors’ doors to using nearby businesses to relieve themselves, then finally renting a latrine in a basement for 3000 bucks a months.

I know what I would have done, fertilized the Kushner’s flower beds, but then, I’m not a patriotic civil servant with a career at stake, am I? But … I am a little weary of this kind of snobby royalty totally lacking in any sense of noblesse oblige. Just like their papa, the guy who took a tour with the Secret Service in their SUV after testing positive for Covid. I think it’s time to show these folks the back door and ask them to use it on the way out. And don’t come back.

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A few days after the storming of the Bastille, King Donald has barricaded himself in the bunker of the White House, no doubt rabidly occupied with binge-watching his favorite news channels hoping to gauge the pulse of a nation that watched with incredulity the spectacle of a President encouraging his minions to march to the Capitol and stop the certification of Biden. Some dare call it treason, some merely sedition, and most call it criminal. Even his pandering former Attorney General, picked to be his personal lawyer in the Justice Department, called it outrageous and said it was time to Go.

Social media has banned his tweets and rantings. Members of his own party are considering invoking the 25th amendment, the one that removes an incapacitated president from office, Congress is eyeing impeachment once more, Cabinet loyalists are resigning while major corporations are withdrawing funding and support for the legislators who backed the move to block counting the electoral college votes. The worm has turned. With less than two weeks remaining in his term the Donald is a cornered animal, dangerous to everyone and to himself. What he might do, nobody knows including the Donald. Nasty business, politics.

Let’s be honest here and quit sugarcoating this. Trump is batshit crazy. His narcissistic balloon that’s the size of the Hindenburg dirigible is about to go up in flames. The man is a menace. The folks who toadied up to him are abandoning ship now. Apparently, even for the most loyal, a line has been crossed. Up ahead, even they can see the signpost that reads Welcome to the Twilight Zone. For the rest of us, well, we can sit smugly watching the unraveling of this Administration, say I told ya so, but we all know those yahoos that rallied behind the Trumpster and scaled the Capitol battlements are a sizeable percentage of our neighbors and friends.

They want to smash government. They don’t care how. If they can’t do it at the ballot box, by god, they’ll do it with clubs. Trump may be hauled away in a strait jacket, jabbering like an amphetamine monkey, but these folks will still be here to warn each other of the Lizard People and the phony Covid. They could care less about facts or logic, those are worthless to them. The fall of Trump will just be another warning sign. The Apocalypse is nigh, the End is near. Insanity is contagious.

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